Reading with Philosophers, Reading Aristotle, Rejoining the World

Some time ago, I wrote a post about teaching Darwin’s Origin of Species with a philosopher. I considered the differences between our approaches to reading that book or any book. My philosopher friend had to confront something he’d never read, but about which I knew a reasonable amount. This time out, I’m interested in the other side of things. We’re now reading Aristotle’s On the Soul with our students, which is a book I’ve never read before. My friend has a leg up.

We run a seminar style classroom for the equivalent of two fifty-minute classes: one syllabus, one set of readings, one course, two instructors. Our differences reveal themselves as we read texts together.  From what I can gather, the students genuinely enjoy our occasional disagreements, because at the heart of them are often disciplinary differences.

To make this work, we have to be relatively versatile, so we tackle broad themes. The first time out we tried “Democracy,” the next time we went even further, trying “Nature.” This time we decided to work on “The Soul.” We’re good friends, so we get together before the first class meeting a few times to hammer out the general approach. In every instance, we want students to burrow underneath modern or commonplace understandings of concepts like these. Thus far, we’ve always started with ancient texts before moving into modern ones. We cover enormous distances in time. This is liberating, and it makes me uneasy, depending upon the day.

The Christian notion of an eternal soul is not our central concern. We will read some of Augustine’s Confessions, specifically the stuff toward the end about memory and time. We’re thinking more broadly, in something roughly resembling Aristotelian fashion, where “the soul” describes the faculties or capacities necessary for living things to have experience in the first place, including how those faculties shape or direct a creature’s being-in-the-world. Certain modern psychological ideas apply when it comes to humans. We’ve scheduled big chunks of William James’ Principles of Psychology for just this reason. Neither of us are physicalists or rank materialists, nor do we find purely neuroscientific explanations for things like “consciousness” all that convincing, so in that very broad sense, we agree. We have no agenda other than that.

We want students to ask better questions about these capacities or faculties. For example, one can certainly describe the physical mechanisms involved in hearing something, or talk about where memory is seated in the brain, but this tells us very little about what those kinds of being-in-the-world are or how one experiences them. Talk about plumbing or parts doesn’t begin to get at the experience of something. And we are very serious about what it means to have an experience, because too often that term acts as a catch-all for things we’d rather not be precise or clear about, a vast container for almost anything. We don’t mean to sneak the eternal or paranormal in the discussion by some end around, rather, we both think modern science only explains so much about how and why our being-in-the-world happens to be how it is. If forced to categorize our work, I’d say we’re teaching something like phenomenology, but not all of the time.

I’ve given over to a slower method with On the Soul, mostly because I don’t know any more about Aristotle’s context than my philosopher friend does. (He probably knows more about ancient Greece than I do, seeing how he teaches and reads lots of different Greek texts philosophy, plays, epic poetry.) We read twenty pages of Aristotle before each class meeting. It’s more than enough. There’s something wonderfully democratic in this. Of course, a certain tinge of irony comes with that statement, because we historians, rightly in most cases, believe the content we deliver should be democratic too. We usually mean by “democratic” the inclusion of many voices, a thickening of context.  My friend thinks methods in the classroom should be democratic, because he believes any student can understand, or at least get the general gist of, a difficult text like Aristotle’s Physics or On the Soul, provided students have enough time to work these texts out. I’m a deliberate writer and thinker, so I’ve been brought along pretty easily to this view, for the time being, anyway.

Questioning the presuppositions we have about everyday things—which Aristotle does—requires careful teaching methods. My philosopher friend is dedicated to seminar work in ways most historians tend not to be, or in ways that chafe against my natural inclination for context or for getting something “right” before moving on.

Half of the students’ final grade stems from participation. This is totally unreasonable for the vast majority of us who teach history. We teach surveys before enormous numbers of students, and this limits what we can do with a text or with a classroom. In those cases, brilliantly planned lectures connecting things thematically counts as a genuine gift. My thinking is probably too discursive for truly good lecturing, so I admire those who do it well. I count myself uniquely privileged to teach in classrooms with fewer students on some occasions. Of course, those numbers creep up every year as our university grows.

I don’t know if he would put it this way, but my philosopher friend structures his teaching methods around Aristotle’s thinking methods. Aristotle describes what, in our translation, are called “impasses.” My friend reminded us one day that the word impasse is a take on “aporia,” here a point in an argument where some seemingly unresolvable contradiction or puzzle presents itself.  We talked a bit about this. He wants students to experience impasses in class. By concentrating so carefully on a particular section of text, insisting that students refer to it over and over again, we eventually push at the boundaries of language about our shared world. This is what Aristotle does too when he reaches those points of “impasse.” In Book III, Chapter 4 of On the Soul, we get Aristotle’s puzzlement over just what intellect is:

But one might find it an impasse, if the intellect is simple and without attributes and has nothing in common with anything, as Anaxagoras says, how it could think, if thinking is a way of being acted upon (for it seems to be by virtue of something in common that is present in both that one thing acts and another is acted upon), and also whether the intellect is itself an intelligible thing. For either there would be intellect in everything else, if not by virtue of something else that it is itself intelligible, but what is intelligible is something one in kind, or else there would be something else mixed in it, which makes it intelligible like other things. As for a thing’s being acted upon by virtue of something common, the distinction was made earlier, that the intellect is in a certain way the intelligible things in potency, but is actively none of them before it thinks them; it is in potency in the same way a tablet is, when nothing written is present in it actively—this is exactly what happens with the intellect. And it is itself intelligible in the same way its intelligible objects are, for in the case of things without material what one thinks and what is thought are the same thing, for contemplative knowing and what is known in that way are the same thing (and one must consider the reason why this sort of thinking is not always happening); but among things having material, each of them is potentially something intelligible, so that there is no intellect present in them (since intellect is a potency to be such things without their material) but there is present in them something intelligible.

So Aristotle wants to know if intellect—this thinking part of the soul—is itself intelligible in the same way anything else in the world is intelligible. This does require some acquaintance with Aristotle’s idea of form and matter. Our translator, Joe Sachs, sometimes renders “form” in Aristotle as “being-at-work-staying-itself.” This was a revelation for me. I’m not sure if this confused or helped students. Aristotle’s way of thinking is very strange to them, and my friend gives a pretty long tether when it comes to letting the students struggle with ideas like these. Sometimes, he’ll let them fumble around in the dark and debate it for an hour or more before intervening with anything other than Socratic questions. This drives me nuts. My thoughts race, and I feel like climbing the walls as I resist the impulse to explain. He thinks if we get in the way too much, they’ll never get it. They have to experience the impasse with Aristotle.

We work through form and matter in this particular class regularly, pretty much every day. Without belaboring it too much, it’s a mistake to think about “form” in Aristotle as simply shape or look. Form is how the world hangs together; it’s what things are for, their “being-at-work-staying-themselves.” Matter is not material in a strictly physical sense—although it can be—but is something more like unintelligible world-stuff that lacks any meaning at all unless it appears in the world in some form. A house, for example, has form and is for something (“sheltering”), but considered merely as the stuff that makes it up, it isn’t, strictly speaking, anything. We could imagine lots of structures made up of stuff, but if the stuff isn’t doing what houses are for, it’s not a house. Yet, we could imagine an abandoned house, not sheltering anything. In that case, we recognize it as a house, even if it’s not actively doing what it’s for. That abandoned house still has the potential to shelter someone. It doesn’t drop out of the world as we experience it in its relations, in its holding-together—matter without form, without meaning—it is, rather, “being-at-work-staying-itself.”

Some things, like the intellect, don’t have matter, only form. Yet Aristotle knows there appears to be some relationship between what we think and the things we think about. Thinking is an activity presumably set in motion by the things thought about. Aristotle’s impasse happens because he ponders whether it makes any sense at all to say the intellect is entirely independent of the intelligible things it thinks. Aristotle pushes hard at what we mean when we say “intellect,” that word we use to describe the faculty necessary to have a thought. Of course, the pragmatist in me sometimes wants to throw my hands up and just say, well, we know thinking goes on, why do we have to work so damned hard on figuring out just what it is?

Aristotle’s use of the tablet in the quote above is misleading without care. We could conclude he endorses empiricist accounts that split the world into a blank slate mind “inside” (subject) and concrete physical matter that feeds us simple ideas from “outside” (objects), which we then combine later to create complex ideas or thoughts (roughly the Lockean associationist view).

As we read this passage, considering how Aristotle thinks the world hangs together, we reached the conclusion that the shared world he describes must be shot through with purpose and meaning from the get-go. This is why Aristotle says “what is intelligible is something one in kind.” Active human subjects don’t conjure up the world in its various relations out of inert “objective,” disconnected atoms of physical matter. Rather, anything having matter in Aristotle’s sense is potentially intelligible and only has some meaning or purpose if it has form, and the power of intellect, its potential to think this, is one reason why our world hangs together in the way we experience it. This doesn’t mean the intellect itself isn’t intelligible to us. It is intelligible like any other thing with a form we encounter in the world, but in this case, its “being-at-work-staying-itself”—its form—lies purely in its potential to think intelligible things since it has no matter associated with it.

So we push together at the boundaries of our language. We wonder, when we say we “think,” what does that really mean? And, what words can we use to describe what we call “thinking?” Maybe this all seems like a leisure activity to some of us. I’m coming around to a different point of view. Experiencing impasses with others is worth doing. With experiences like these, we rejoin parts of the world we ignore most of the time. We work through the world everyday with nary a thought about what our activities mean or what our words to describe the world mean. We are mostly thoughtless in that way.

Some of my students want to change the world. I don’t know if Aristotle’s inherently meaningful, thinking cosmos will help them with that. Yet I know thinking with him will help, because if we challenge workaday assumptions about just what we experience, we can begin to see how inadequate our ways of describing the world often are. It takes time to push down the fences of our everyday language, and it takes patience too, because in our pushing we are confronted with impasses. But if changing the world requires a creative re-description of the world we share, one could do worse than start with Aristotle and begin by rejoining it.